About

I'm jlucas and this is my personal website. I thank you for visiting and hope you find something interesting here.

Cool Stuff

Let's start with some stuff that I like:

• Free Software: No one tells me what I can and cannot do with my software;
• Free Speech: You have the right to say stuff that I might not like;
• Privacy: It's none of your business until I knowingly allow it to be;
• Decentralized Networks: P2P file sharing (e.g. BitTorrent), DarkNets (e.g. I2P, Tor), all cool stuff;
• Software Minimalism: Less code = less potential bugs = easier to maintain and extend;
• Touching Grass: FOSS is cool as an alternative to proprietary software, but if it can be done without electricity, then that's an even better alternative.

Bad Stuff

And here is some stuff I dislike:

• Proprietary Software: Keep your secrets to yourself, don't have them run on other people's hardware;
• DRM: Sure, restrict the freedom of legitimate users. Us criminals will just keep using our alternative user-respecting sources (oh hi officer, I pinky promise I was just doing the voice of the bad guy);
• JavaScript on the Web: The attacker sends arbitrary code to the victim, and the victim runs that code locally and may send the results back to the attacker. Now replace attacker with web server and victim with web browser. They've normalized RCE;
• Mobile Phones: Mostly surveillance bricks that turn people into TikTok scrolling zombies. (post)

Alright that's enough bitching in the about section, I have posts for that.

Software I wrote

I'm not much of a programmer, but here are some highlights of stuff I made from scratch. Check out my Codeberg profile for other stuff that I have worked on. I also have a Microsoft GitHub account to contribute to projects that are hosted there.

• cmcli: Command line application to query bus schedules in Lisbon. Useless if you are one of the ~8 billion people who live elsewhere;
• termdye: C library for drawing colored pixels on the terminal using unicode blocks and ANSI escape sequences;
• pathdye: Program that uses the termdye library to help visualise path finding algorithms (only A* implemented but that's the easy part). It doesn't do much other than look cool I guess, I only wrote it as a learning exercise. Also it was the reason why I wrote termdye, and could serve as a reference implementation;
• snake-termdye: Snake game using the termdye library because I was bored. Vim keys only.

Software I use

I like software minimalism to some degree. I keep a dotfiles repo with most of my configs and some scripts. Here is a list of some of the stuff I use:

• Operating Systems:
  • Gentoo Linux on Desktop/Laptop;
  • Alpine Linux on Servers/VMs/...;
  • Arch Linux ARM (upstream|mobile) on my PinePhone (post);
• Window Manager: dwm (my build);
• Terminal Emulator: st (my build);
• Shell: zsh;
• Text Editor/"IDE": (Neo)vim;
• Web Browser: LibreWolf;
• Mail Client: neomutt, mostly set up using Luke Smith's mutt-wizard;
• Image Viewer: nsxiv;
• Video Player: mpv;
• PDF Viewer: zathura;
• File Manager: nnn;
• Network Management: Netifrc;
  • Wireless: wpa_supplicant;
  • DHCP: dhcpcd;
• Init System: OpenRC.